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Observer Apex vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Observer Apex
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
103rd
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Observer Apex is 0.1%, down from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.7%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jeroen-Dubbelman - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good network visibility
The primary use case is for monitoring and troubleshooting. We also use it for security.   The correlation of data in Apex helps to get full visibility of the entire enterprise. Apex is where we get the end-user experience score from one to ten. Network visibility is the most valuable feature.…
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Network visibility is the most valuable feature."
"SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly. The product allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the monitoring capabilities."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports."
"One of the best features is the reports feature."
"It is scalable."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"Reporting tools are a great feature along with the ability to create customized reports for you"
"All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great."
 

Cons

"The pricing and AI can be improved."
"The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is complex, and I find it challenging."
"Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."
"The solution's database performance could be improved."
"We decided that we were no longer going to trust that their products have not been capitalized."
"The interface could be made more user-friendly."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"The price of the solution can be improved."
"GUI needs improvement with a more graphical dashboard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
55%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Capita
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.